Christmas Caroling

Wednesday evening, groups went out caroling.  One group went to the nursing home and another group sang to some of the shut-ins right around the church. It was a very moving time.  I am not sure what made it different from last year?  Maybe the intersection of our lives now, after three Christmas seasons here? Maybe that we had a huge group of youth and children?

For me, one house in particular meant so much.  We stopped at a widow's house; I had her husband's funeral this summer.  As we sang "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," there was both joy and grief as we came to the verse, "Mild He lays His glory by, born that we no more may die, born to raise us from the earth, born to give us second birth."

One of the adults with us was a fellow who has been investigating the faith.  He was greatly moved by the tears and responses of some of the people we visited.  He said, "We should do this more often..."

Indeed. It could be a great way to give people an invitation to church if you went throughout a neighborhood.  Sometimes in evangelism, people will say when they felt a need to come to church, they felt "invited" because someone stopped by, even if it was years before.
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In this Christmas season, I was struck hard by something Alex Absalom wrote: "it is easy for the poor to sacrifice, but hard for them to be generous.  It is easy for the rich to be generous, but hard for them to sacrifice." This rings true in my life, as one who is very rich.  I can easily be self-satisfied with my off-hand generosity.  And as much as I am blessed to tithe, I cannot say that I have sacrificed much. 

And what seems important in all this is how much the Lord blesses and works through sacrificial giving.  Mary and Joseph gave us Jesus.  The Father gave us the Son. Christ gave his very life.  I can never repay that, and the Gospel of Grace means that we do not even try.  We take it as a gift and bathe in the love of the Giver.  The question is, what is the overflow of our hearts?

Priming the Pump

Jessie is working with Tracy Tackett (the fellow helping us get our website moving) to put some downloadable (is that a word?) evangelism tools on the website. In advance of them bieng up there, let me tell you a little bit about what we're trying. We will have some of them available in church on Sunday.

One of the things that I find very quick and easy in faith-sharing is to have some cards with information about the church-- worship times, address, basic info like that. Then, you can easily leave that with your tip at a restaurant (don't tell me it doesn't work—Mary Philips has helped three servers find the Lord this way!), or pass it to someone in line at the grocery store. Or you can give it to a friend who doesn't already have a church home. Or... you get the picture.

What we are hoping, then, is to have a download on the website where you can print off your own cards and have them ready to hand out.

One of the cards is a favorite of mine, a card inviting families to our Children's Ministry. Jessie made a compact little card. When I am out and see a family, or a dad having a special lunch with his kids at McDonald's, I just walk up and briefly say something like, “it's great to see you having so much fun as a family.” Then, as I give them the card, “I'd like to invite you to our church and the great children's ministry we have going on there.” That's pretty much all you have to do. Sometimes there is a conversation that happens. Sometimes not. But it's ok. You get the word out.

I will let you know when we get the downloads up. But in the meantime, pray and prepare your hearts to be more open about your faith. To be ready to just simply cross the space in the store or at work to give a simple invitation to church. And then after praying, you will be ready!

A Dose of the Ghost

It's a sweet day in our household. We have been running hard all week long and we had to just sit and stop because tomorrow it gets real again for another week. John is outside playing with his dog, Joseph is playing basketball, and Jessie and Nadia are napping. But not before Jessie made a banana nut bread castle. I have gone out a few times, working through my sermon and each time I am touched by the sight of our warm house. I know that when we come in from the cold, the fire will be going and I can sit down with a nice cup of tea and the pile of books that are on my plate to read in preparation for shepherding the people of God.

Wednesday night, we got a dose of the Ghost at our Wednesday Bible study. We have been spending time on discipleship, following Robert Coleman's The Master Plan of Evangelism and A.B. Bruce's The Training of the Twelve to lay a groundwork for what we will be doing.

There is in this an element of danger, that discipleship, like so much in the Church, can become an onject of study, a time for transferral of information, not transformation. So I like to inject calls to the practical. But I got more than I bargained for!

Alex Absalom sums up the apostolic plan of discipleship when he says that instead of reading lots of books and setting up an elaborate plan for making disciples, you just need to ask, “What is Jesus saying?” And “What are you going to do about it?

When I asked how do we know what Jesus is saying, well, everyone pretty well intuited the content of Foster's Celebration of Discipline and Dallas Willard's Divine Conspiracy. It's simple... anyone can do it.

But then, the obedience question... what are you going to do about it?

In many different ways we admitted, with a simple comment from Tim Miller, that we like to talk about things more than we like to do things. At the risk of sounding like we did a lot of talking... we stayed for 45 minutes past our allotted time.

Johnny Fryman kind of blew it open when he said...”I come from a rural background. We could not pay our preachers much, so we did most of the work ourselves.”

Oh boy. This is what I have been saying for a while. Clergy have been too willing to be the bosses. To be at the head of everything. What if the members did almost everything? What if the pastor preached, visited the sick, evangelized, started new churches (and taught the members to do those things as well!)?

I put forward my idea that maybe we need to go back to 2-year appointments for pastors? The Methodist Church was exploding when that was the pattern. Could it be that made the laity stronger? Jay Barrett said that as it is, a new pastor comes and the church stops to wait and see what the new guy will do.

Shouldn't it be that the church is already doing all kinds of stuff and it doesn't matter who the pastor is?

Joyce Saxon wins the prize for pithiest comment. “Isn't that kind of moving hard on the pastor's family?” I said that moving is not as hard as it seems. I went to 5 elementary schools and on average lived in one place for 20 months until I left home. She said, “That's why you're so warped!”

At the risk of sounding like we talked a lot... yes, but the energy coming out of there. Wes Holland came up to me afterwards and said, “Plant the seed and let us run with it.” Yes. We have been working on that. We are on the verge of some things just letting loose. It's the kind of discipleship and church growth stuff that hopefully has nothing to do with who the pastor is.

I shared that I am discontent and restless. I feel like a chump saying it. 17 new believers this year. Baptisms. 34 new members. But it's linear growth. I want to see multiplication growth. I can't wait for when each new believer wins another new believer! And that keeps rolling. What about if each current member won a new person to the faith? Joyce Saxon said-- leave it to the math teacher-- “that would be exponential growth!”

Ah, exponential!

You know what I think the biggest barrier is? We think we have to be successful. We are afraid it won't work. We are afraid someone will say no to our invitation. I wonder if we can just have joy in asking someone to come to church? Joy in telling someone how much peace we had in prayer!

John Wesley's Journal

Working on my sermon last night, it became clear to me that the biggest influence, by far, on my preaching has been reading John Wesley's Journal. (I would say that it has also been the biggest influence on the way I go about pastoral care as well.)

What I have learned about preaching from 12 years of reading his Journal:

Sin is our biggest problem, the Cross is our remedy, that's what you preach

How to look for the Gospel in the Old Testament

How to preach the Good News to sinners

There is a price to be paid to preach the Gospel

Be willing to go anywhere, learn to be comfortable everywhere, and talk to anyone

Raise up as many people as you can to spread the workers out into the harvest field

A simple word of encouragement to someone that they should seek Christ can bear fruit years later

It's kind of funny. I did not grow up in church. I went to seminary unaware of controversy in the Church. I became a Methodist because of John Wesley, in spite of the Reformed, Baptist and Episcopalian fellows who helped win me to Christ. There is a dear saint here who likes to joke and tell people around the church and town that I am a “closet Baptist.” I will take that as a compliment; but I preach simply what Wesley preached. And he preached the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3) Look at his 52 Standard Sermons. I don't know why we would preach anything else.